Tag Archives: writing prompt

Post navigation

Believe it or not, your characters’ spiritual lives have a big impact on their stories, whether that’s part of the plotline or not. Just as with we humans, our characters have spiritual beliefs – or not – that inform their motivations and decisions in life. In religion, this is called the eschatology of a belief system: what we think happens to us when we die, whether or not we believe in karma, how we view humanity’s purpose in this life, or whether we believe in past lives.

Even if we don’t embrace any of these beliefs, the fact that we don’t also influences our day-to-day motivations and decisions.

It’s easy to by-pass this part of our characters’ development, but it’s essential, I think. Whether your character is a mystic or an atheist, a Buddhist or a Baptist, their belief system – or lack thereof – has everything to do with their movement through life and their story world.

After you’ve gotten clear about a character’s inner world, as we do when using the Third Eye Chakra, go one step further and think about the character’s connection (or not) to a higher power. This higher power can be anything – even their own sense of inner wisdom. Or their meditation practice. Or their love of literature. Their daily hike. Or their daily cocktail. It doesn’t have to be overtly religious or spiritual.

Understanding our characters to this degree can help us portray their complexities in deeply moving and complex ways. And this is the very quality our stories need to have if we want them to stay with readers long after they’ve put our work down.

What is the source of your character’s higher power, and how does it inform her/his way of moving in the world?

Getting inside our characters’ heads can feel second-nature to us writers, and oftentimes, we gravitate to stream-of-consciousness or interior monologues. This can work – as William Faulkner showed us with The Sound and the Fury (although the novel’s success was delayed… and I found it unreadable, but I digress). However, we need to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with this kind of invasion to our characters’ minds.

Showing our readers all the troubled, angry, tired, sad, fragile, and destructive thoughts in our characters’ minds is most definitely a way to connect them with and help them empathize with characters. And the way we do that can mean success or failure.

After we’ve gotten clear with our characters’ voices – as discussed with the Throat Chakra – we can explore their Third Eye Chakra, which is the seat of intuition. What do they know, without a doubt? (We typically think of this as a “gut-level” response to life; however, it starts here, in the Third Eye Chakra, a somewhat ethereal part of us that defies “rational” human thought.)

Whether our characters trust their intuition or not is one thing, and the way we portray that intuition is another. We run interior monologues all the time. This is how we sort out life. We run through a multitude of scenarios, trying on all the “what-ifs” for each one.

What our characters think, HOW they think (stream of consciousness, more understandable broken thoughts, or pretend conversations), and what they do with those thoughts informs not just our readers about how to interpret their stories, but us, the writers of those stories, as well.

How do your characters’ thoughts align – or not – with their desires and motivations, and what does this tell you about their ability to make decisions?

All writing is hard, and dialogue may be one of the hardest aspects of writing. Oftentimes, we start by putting two people in a space with a conflict to create a scene. We start writing, and we get them talking to see where the conversation takes them and the story. While just letting them talk can work and eventually lead us to the core of the scene, it can also sometimes eat up valuable time.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations can help us with crafting characters and giving them voice. Now I’m going to contradict myself, because to be honest, the process of writing is one, big, messy contradiction. What is true for one scene, story, or book, might not be for another. This is the pain and perfection of the creative process. There are no formulaic answers.

Much of the day-to-day dialogue we hear in real life doesn’t belong on the page. Dialogue should be more layered than that. It should accomplish more than just making a scene. It should advance the story, further character development, and more.

The Throat Chakra is the culmination of our expression – our will – that we’ve gathered while identifying our identities in the Root Chakra, our relationships with others in the Sacral Chakra, our ability to be agents of our own lives in the Solar Plexus Chakra, and our level of love and compassion in the Heart Chakra – which is a bridge between the lower and upper chakras.

Before you attempt to get your characters talking, give some thought to all the information you’ve amassed about them by studying them through the lens of the lower four chakras. Think about their desires and motivations. Think about their self-image and self-confidence or lack thereof. Think about their fears and vulnerabilities.

Rather than force them to say what you want, let them be their own free agents. Let them show their not-so-desirable sides – even your protagonist (and even if the protagonist is you). Show them in all their frail humanity. They will thank you for it, and your readers will thank you for it.

Which one of your characters has been giving you the most trouble? Write this character’s monologue, telling you what you’re not letting them say, and see what you discover. (Let her/him be in control, for a change.)

When we get clear about each of our characters’ sense of awareness about themselves, their awareness of each other and how they interact and take action, as we discussed with the Solar Plexus Chakra, we can then move forward with writing authentic, round, dynamic supporting characters for our protagonist – even, and maybe especially – their antagonist(s).

We humans sometimes have a tendency to want to get revenge in our writing against people who have harmed us. But hard as it may be to write about our stories’ antagonists with love and compassion – especially when we’re writing memoir-based stories – it’s essential if we want to connect with readers and help them see the complexities of life and relationships in a new light. (And remember, this isn’t about writing to excuse bad behavior. It’s about exploring the complexities of the human condition.)

As the wonderful Ann Lamott says, “You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.”

Because like it or not, even our real-life antagonists are facets of us. Throughout life, we come up against people who serve as mirrors of us. Think of it as spiritual checks and balances. And this is the level of understanding and insight we want to impart on the page.

Do you have an antagonist you want to paint as evil and are having a hard time finding her/his humanity?

Go back to this character’s backstory, as we discussed in the post on the Root Chakra, and see what you can find in their history.

A common expectation from readers is that we show them the development of our characters. Readers want to see characters learn and change. A common method for creating this expected arc is to create plot points that put characters in situations that will challenge their modes of operation, create friction, and require new decisions to surpass the obstacle and reach their desires.

When we embrace the elements of the third chakra – the Solar Plexus chakra – we can begin to look at our characters in a more complex way. We can take their awareness about themselves and the world – in relation to their responses to other characters – that we discovered by looking through the lens of the second – Sacral – chakra to allow our characters to turn those reflections from others back on themselves. This is where self-awareness comes from, which informs a character’s sense of agency in the world.

This is not to say that all characters will achieve high levels of self-awareness over the course of their individual stories, or even if they do, that they’ll use the awareness wisely. In fact, most of them will not. But as the writers of their stories, we need to be able to discern what we know about them and what they know about themselves, which will inform how much agency we give them. And we need to be able to impart those differences to our readers.

What do your characters know about themselves, and what do you know about them? Does your main character have a strong or weak sense of agency? That is, does she/he take action or just let life happen?